To be consistently successful in business you must have a deep understanding of your customers and your target audience

With that in mind the first step in designing a dramatically more effective marketing machine to drive that success is a process we at B2B3 call “The Drill.”

“The Drill” is the project required to deeply understand your target customers, the target marketplace, and the business you’re really in (from the perspective of those target customers). No assumptions, no aspirational concepts of how you wish to be perceived, just the real knowledge about your business, your target market and your target audience.

Is it about your products or their problems?

The purpose of “The Drill” is to get that knowledge and then establish a shared understanding across your company as to why exactly some prospects become customers (and others do not). Another way of looking at this is that you simply need to know what business problem your potential customers need to solve and how they want to research and buy a solution to that business problem.

All companies believe they already know the answer to these questions (of course), but reality today in B2B is that there are always knowledge gaps and dissent across an organization as to the details. This fragmentation creates confusion and lack of shared focus, which in turn makes your message/s hard for the target audience to understand, leading to missed opportunities and wasted time and expense.

Actually deeply understanding your target audience and knowing why your product is right for a particular prospective customer is both incredibly hard to get right and the most powerful force in marketing. It is also the most rare knowledge in the business-to-business world. It requires very specialized B2B expertise and hard work. No amount of money spent on tools, advertising, list buying or analyst research can replace it.

The B2B³ Drill is a unique consultative process that will use the skills present across your business to enable more precise targeting and build evocative messaging to engage your best prospects and progress them through the “buyer's journey” (see Step 2: “The Black Box Machine” for more on that). “The Drill” also confirms if any specific branding and awareness effort is required (often times it isn’t).

“The Drill” doesn’t require multiple expensive rounds of market research or exhaustive months of internal meetings and the successful result of “The Drill” will be a shared vision across your whole business about the most compelling things you can say to a prospective customer that will engage them in a journey to buy your products. It is designed to align your company’s messaging strategy in one direction. And as we all know when everyone on our team is rowing in the same direction great things can happen.

This is not marketing (or marketing-consulting) as usual, but actually an “intervention” that will allow you to break the all too common cycle of repeating the decisions of the past (or copying the unwise decisions of others), allowing you to consider a much more effective mix of strategic techniques that will both lower your costs of marketing and increase your marketing delivery exponentially.

“The Drill” is just the first of three key steps, but by completing it you will already have a much better chance of engaging a prospect in a productive conversation that will lead to a higher rate of business closure and your sales and marketing teams will have a signi+icantly clearer view of the right people to engage, driving down wasted time and resources and driving up business. Let B2B3 show you how we can drive this project for your company and unlock the game-changing efficiencies, effectiveness and cost savings you want need.